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Monthly Archives: May 2018

It’s been pirate week in the prep unit this week. We have been learning about the letter arrrrrrrrr (r), following and making maps, following procedures to make pirate ships and then sequencing the steps we took, drawing and describing our pirates and much more. We even had a pirate come and teach for the day. The pesky pirate Captain Black Beard.

See below for all of our pirate adventures!!

The infamous Captain Black Beard taught the class on Tuesday. Miss Yarni ate a piece of her cake so she made her walk the plank. Thankfully for Miss Yarni she is a good swimmer, she was able to swim through the freezing water to get back to her class by Wednesday!

The students followed a procedure to build their own ships. I modelled the steps to build the ship. We discussed the vocabulary of parts of a ship. Here is my ship.

The students hard at work building their pirate ships.

The finished products. It safe to say the enjoyed their first time building a pirate ship.

DRAWING A SETTING

Earlier this term we have been learning about narratives. We have worked a lot on the character and the setting in the story. The students got a ship and a pirate. Their task was to draw the setting and label their ship and pirate. Get your telescope out and view the finished products.

I’ve just realised that shape that I’ve put the posters up resembles a ship. I definitely did that on purpose….

DRAW AND DESCRIBING OUR PIRATES

The wonderful Mrs Selamet came into our class one day and modelled how to teach functional grammar. Functional grammar is the way in which sentences should be written. We were focusing on noun groups; a word or group of words that are used to describe a noun. Using noun groups makes our writing far more interesting. I took a leaf out of Mrs Selamet’s book and did a very similar lesson. We had already brainstormed vocabulary on how a pirate looks. I started the lesson by teaching the students how to draw a pirate. Then I added my detail. The students went off and drew their own pirates and added as much detail as they could. Then myself and Rose and a teacher’s aide in training went around and asked the students to describe their pirates and we wrote down the noun group they they used. We came to the floor and built noun groups to describe my pirate on the board. I gave the students the sentence starter of ‘My pirate has’ and their next challenge was to go and write at least 1 sentence using a noun group from their pirate drawing. The results are fantastic!!

The statistics and probability maths strand for foundation states that the students need to be able to answer Yes or No questions. When marking the roll I like to take that time to get the students to do things related to their work. I might ask them to tell me a word that starts with a letter we have learned, or give them a word and they need to tell me the letter it starts with. This week I have been focusing on yes or no questions. When I call each name that student answers the question with yes or no. Then, as a class we read the data and decide if more people answered yes or no to a question. We practice our counting by counting the ‘yes’ and ‘no’ columns. I find this a fantastic and fun way to slip in a little extra maths.

The kids weren’t sure what flavour salt and vinegar chips were until I said the ones in the pink or purple packet. Now they all know what salt and vinegar chips are…turns out this is a great way to teach new vocabulary too.

I knew I liked my class for a reason. Red is my favourite colour also.

If the student’s said ‘yes’ they needed to tell me what sort of a pet they have. An excellent way to build their oral language skills.

In maths at the moment we are learning about time, we have looked at things that take a long time and things that take a short time. This week we are learning to sequence (order) events in our daily lives. In Prep B we have a morning routine. This morning I got the kids to tell me their morning routine before doing it. I then took photos of them doing the routine. We discussed the order that we do things in. Would we eat our fruit before we unpack our bags? No! Our fruit is in our bags!! After we did our morning routine the kids then went and drew what we do 1st, 2nd, 3rd and 4th every morning.

CVC words or consonant, vowel, consonant words are our very best friends. We have learned lots of letters and are now able to make our own cvc words and try to sound them out. Some words have letters that they haven’t learned yet, so the focus is on matching and identifying letters.

All of our activities this lesson were based on either identifying single letters and looking at CVC words, identifying the letters and writing the word.

Here is Ayiden hard at work making CVC words.

Ayiden doing an amazing job.

Rayaan did a great job! She recognised that letter b and used a capital letter when she couldn’t find a lower case letter. How great is that?

Abdullah and Shoaib busy sorting, matching, writing and of course…posing.

Joseph is hard at work finding all the m’s and practising his writing.

Amazing job Joey!!

It’s safe to say that everyone had a ball. We are loving learning and playing with letters.